Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre (VDC), the first truly integrated Infrastructure as a Service offering available to the European market, won the European Award for Cloud Infrastructure at the 5th annual Datacentre Awards last night (13th June 2012).

The service, which enables users to self-provision their own virtual data centre at the click-of-a-mouse, was launched in late 2011, when it received an extremely warm and enthusiastic response from customers, analysts and journalists.

Presenting the Award, organisers praised the service’s integrated networking component as a key differentiator in the European cloud market.

Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre is built on best-of-breed technologies and provides a single, easy-to-use portal where users can provision and manage their cloud compute, storage and networking resources. Unlike the vast majority of cloud services, VDC is integrated with Claranet’s own MPLS network, ensuring greater accountability, reliability and ease of management.

Claranet’s UK Managing Director, Michel Robert, said:

“Although Claranet has a long pedigree in hosting and networking, we did not want to jump on the cloud bandwagon without ensuring that we could bring a genuinely useful service to market. To ensure we did that, late last year we conducted extensive research among end users about their key concerns about cloud computing; and the Virtual Data Centre service was designed to reflect this feedback.

“In a competitive market, we needed a truly innovative service that offered real differentiation from other players,” continued Robert. “By listening to our potential customers’ concerns, we decided to build a service that featured integrated networking, exclusively in-country data centres and a hypervisor-agnostic platform - addressing the three key concerns amongst users, of reliability, data sovereignty and ease of migration.

“This Award for Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre, the first pan-European competition we’ve entered the service, is testament to the solid groundwork that we did, and the skill and expertise of our product and technical teams. The Datacentre Awards are judged by a panel of our peers in the datacentre industry, so this Award is a huge vote of confidence in the service,” he concluded.